If you ever scroll through the dating profiles of young women looking to date other women, a few contemporary queer trends leap out. One well-known app asks users to describe a perfect Sunday afternoon. Popular women-seeking-women answers include: “training with my ladies soccer team” (no, thanks); “curling up with my cat” (yes, please) and, with surprising frequency, “dressing up as Anne Boleyn”. There may even be photos to prove it.
This is no surprise to anyone who follows history-themed TikTok and Instagram accounts. For gen Z and younger millennial women, whether queer or simply fourth-wave feminist, Anne Boleyn is a progressive icon.
Boleyn’s popularity isn’t new: Henry VIII’s second wife has captured every generation’s imagination. In 1682, the wildly successful melodrama Vertue Betray’d portrayed her as a piously Protestant victim of Catholic conspiracy. Donizetti’s opera Anna Bolena, composed against a tide of Italian nationalism, framed her story as a cautionary tale about the risks of ambition, tempered with sympathy for Boleyn as the prey of an oppressive, irreligious tyrant. Philippa Gregory’s 2001 The Other Boleyn Girl, written in the era that shamed Monica Lewinsky, portrays the dark-haired Anne as an overreaching femme fatale, guilty as charged of incest, adultery and unwomanly meddling in politics, in sharp contrast to an idyllic, domestic and unambitious blonde, her sister Mary. Like all icons, we reimagine her in each generation through contemporary prejudices.
For today’s young women, however, Boleyn is easily claimed as a doomed rebel. As many a viral social media reel will remind you, Boleyn was a woman determined to engage with the ideological battles of her time—religious reform, humanist debates, the struggle between French and Spanish influence—before being judicially murdered by a violent and sexually controlling misogynist. All this is true—albeit, like all historical valorisations, a matter of selective emphasis.
1536, a new play from the young writer Ava Pickett, is the theatrical manifestation of the TikTok fandom. What you take from it will probably depend on whether you like your feminism painted in the primary colours of youthful fury or miss the absence of light and shade. Life in this Tudor England looks like The Handmaid’s Tale with corsets. Men are universally evil.
We see these women’s lives being shaped by the same forces of misogyny that destroyed Anne
Like Rona Munro’s intriguing play Mary, which related the story of the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots through the gossip swapped by her servants, Pickett never places her icon on stage. Instead, we hear about Boleyn’s fate through the rumours exchanged by three young women living in Essex. It’s a powerful idea, and, as one might expect, we soon see each of these women’s lives being shaped by the same forces of misogyny that destroyed Anne. Lyndsey Turner’s production for the Almeida was off to a strong start when it cast a trio of up-and-coming actresses: Liv Hill, Siena Kelly and Tanya Reynolds. All three are ones-to-watch. There was much potential here.
The central tension is between Kelly as Anna, our sharp-witted, dark-haired, sexually confident and fashionable heroine, and Hill as Jane, an ill-educated blonde handmaiden to the patriarchy. You don’t need to know much about Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour, the drip who replaced her as Henry VIII’s queen, to see what’s going on here. Reynolds, who excels in roles that mix clowning and vulnerability, does admirable work as Mariella, a lovelorn but practical midwife caught between these two lifelong friends. This script, however, prevents her from sufficiently complicating the basic binary.
All the tropes of online Boleyn apologia are here. Henry VIII is a toxic male influencer, enabling new outbreaks of domestic abuse across the country. (The rise of therapy-speak in contemporary life has paralleled the fashion in popular history for diagnosing Henry VIII as a “psychopath” and a “narcissist”.) Anna argues that her royal namesake is innocent of promiscuity, yet she herself wants to sleep with half the village without consequence. Her own final act of sexual transgression is doltishly self-sabotaging. This Boleyn stand-in is fighting for the right to detach sex not only from love and marriage but from basic mutual respect. Perhaps for gen Z nothing is more feminist than notching up another orgasm at any cost, but this is not a mindset any Tudor woman would recognise.
The tragedy is that Boleyn was indeed falsely accused, calumnied and the victim of outrageous misogyny. Yet it is not new to say this, as Pickett suggested in a recent interview. It is academic orthodoxy. I’m as fond of my Anne Boleyn “B” necklace as any other brunette Tudor obsessive. (There were several on display among young queer women in the audience.) But, while 1536 will tell you what Boleyn means to contemporary young women, it reveals little about her own time.
